Re: ataNG

> What was the deal about the posting from the guy (on the freebsd lists)
> who kept losing his partition table? Was that atapicam related too?
Are you being facetious? ATAPI, to the best of my knowledge,
only applies to CD-ROM/CD-R/CD-RW and probably DVD drives.
>
> We will be bringing in ATAng for the SATA and chipset support, but I
> intend to do it under a new driver name with a new major number. I am
> not going to remove the old ATA driver (though they might end up being
> mutually exclusive). I've learned the lesson from FreeBSD when Soren
> changed out ATA the first time and broke a lot of people, then did it
> again the second time with ATAng. That isn't going to happen in
> DragonFly, hopefully.
Wouldn't it be possible to have something like a quirks table in reverse?
The idea being to default to the old driver, only using the new driver in
the presence of SATA or recognized hardware, i.e. hardware that had
already been tested to some degree of comfort. This would get us less
testing, but it would allow it to be a default of sorts and still avoid
using users as unwitting guinea pigs.
-Kip